"Really you must calm yourself. You went away from the Exhibition at an early hour. There is no doubt about it, and you must have a brother or some person deeply interested in you, for some man afterwards got hold of the cook, Bertha Seward, and begged her for Heaven's sake not to mention your departure from the Exhibition that night. He gave her money—she told me so. And Inspector Clarke knows it, as well as I, for Hester Seward has told me that he went to question her——"
"M'sieur Clarke!"—at the name of "Clarke," which she whispered after him, the girl's face turned a more ghastly gray, for Clarke was the ogre, the griffon, the dragon of her recent life, at the mere mention of whom her heart leaped guiltily. Suddenly, abandoning the struggle, she fell back from her sitting posture, tried to hide her face in the bedclothes, and sobbed wildly:
"I didn't do it! I didn't do it!"
"Do what? Who said you had done anything?" asked Winter. "It isn't you that Mr. Clarke suspects, you silly child, it is a man named——"
She looked up with frenzied eyes to hear the name—but Winter stopped. In his hands the unhappy Pauline was a little hedge-bird in the talons of a hawk.
"Named?" she repeated.
"Never mind his name."
She buried her head afresh, giving out another heart-rending sob, and from her smothered lips came the words:
"It wasn't I—it was—it was——"
"It was who?" asked Winter.